The Edge of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  Steamboat Spring and then the Sheep Creek Hills. How nightmarish that had been back in ’45, climbing up, then sliding down with the wagon wheels locked with sawed logs.

  It was a lot easier on horseback.

  He made it across the Utah country, passing many abandoned stations that had once fed and housed riders for the Pony Express, around Salt Lake, and neared Bridger’s Fort. Bridger wasn’t there anymore. The Pony Express had used it as a station back in 1860 and ’61, but the army had taken over the post during the Mormon War in the 1850s. When that ugly incident had ended, the government had not let Bridger take back his property. Colter wasn’t sure what kind of deal Russell, Major, and Waddell had negotiated with the army to get that Pony Express station. The army had left for the war, but the blue-boys were back when Colter rode to the post. Infantry boys, Colter noticed. A lot of good foot soldiers could do in horse country.

  “I’m looking for the U.P. rails,” Colter told the post commander, a major who looked as if he needed to march a lot with his soldier boys.

  “Well, sir, it’s not here.”

  Colter waited.

  “Not yet anyway. A year from now, perhaps. If the Indians stay peaceable.”

  Colter took the coffee a sergeant brought him.

  “It doesn’t follow the old Oregon Trail, does it?”

  “Not exactly. At least, not east of here. The rails are being laid mostly south of the old trail.”

  “And a Hell on Wheels, or a town called Violet?”

  The major shrugged. He had that bulging red nose of a hard drinker, but the sergeant, standing behind his commanding officer, kept nodding at Colter, letting him know what was right.

  “When the U.P. . . . or maybe the Central Pacific . . . reaches Fort Bridger, then maybe I can tell you. If this Violet is a Hell on Wheels town on the U.P. line, by grab, I’d have to guess that the citizens there are more in touch with civilization than we are.”

  At the stables, he found two soldiers admiring Plenty Medicine. Colter could smell the whiskey on their breath.

  “I’ll be taking my leave now, boys,” Colter said. “With my horse and my mule.”

  “Fancy rig you got there,” the corporal said, a big brawler with a misshapen nose and several missing teeth. “Ain’t seen a pistol like that since the war.”

  Colter waited.

  “And it had been on a dead Reb.”

  “You a Reb?” the private said, a tall man who leaned against the fence, and cracked his knuckles.

  “All I want is my horse,” Colter said. “And my mule.”

  “You don’t sound like no Reb,” the corporal said.

  “I served with the First Oregon Cavalry, boys. Wore the blue like you two are wearing now. And I was born in Pennsylvania. That satisfy you?”

  “No,” they said at the same time.

  He had to concede that both men had gumption. No sense, but plenty of grit. They came at him quickly, bringing up their fists. Two men ready for a row, but with fists. Coming against a man armed with a LeMat revolver on his hip. Colter caught a glimpse of something shiny, and then learned that this fight wasn’t so one-sided to his advantage after all.

  The blow from the tall man split Colter’s cheek, almost broke the bone, and blood rushed down his face as he fell against the mule, which snorted and kicked. The next blow, also from the private, hit the back of Colter’s head, and more blood flowed, and more pain shot through his head.

  “Let me have at him, Grover!” the corporal yelled.

  “I want his gun,” Grover sang out.

  “I want his boots.”

  “I’ll take the mule.”

  “And I get the stallion.”

  Colter felt an iron fist ram into his stomach. He doubled over, and through blurred vision, he saw the corporal, drawing back his elbow to fire another punch. Colter tasted blood, and felt the coffee he had been drinking in the commanding officer’s quarters coming up his throat. But at least the corporal wasn’t using brass knuckles like the tall private.

  The corporal slammed another fist, that somehow, vaguely, Colter managed to deflect, but then the soldier latched another hand on Colter’s collar. Colter tried to shake his vision clear. The big brute’s right clawed onto the gunbelt, and for a moment, Colter thought that the corporal was trying to pull the LeMat. But no. Instead, the big man was lifting Colter off his feet. The man’s strength astonished Colter as he felt his boots leave the ground. The mule sidestepped, snorted, and kicked, but the corporal shoved Colter and the mule until the animal was pinned against the corral fence. Then Colter was lifted up and thrown over the mule, and felt himself crashing into the corral.

  He came up quickly. This time, he reached for his LeMat, only to find it gone. The mule kicked up dust and bellowed. Both soldiers cursed. Ducking underneath the railings, Colter could sense the men trying to get around the mule, but that mule kept kicking and braying, madder than Tim Colter was getting himself.

  “I got the gun, Grover,” the corporal yelled.

  “Then let’s finish that ol’ boy. Before Sergeant Meriden spoils our fun.”

  Colter moved to the kicking mule. He found the leather sack, somehow managed to pull it from the thongs holding it in place. It weighed a damned ton, and strained his muscles as he cleared away from the angry mule.

  Voices rang out. Shouts. Someone even blew a whistle. Colter couldn’t make out the words, and didn’t try to. He focused on Grover with the brass knuckles and the corporal with Colter’s LeMat.

  The corporal came out of the dust first, holding the LeMat in his right hand. Grinning. Even as Tim Colter swung the heavy, clanging sack. Bones crunched when the sack connected against the corporal’s arm, and the man screamed, and fell into a heap. The momentum carried Colter past with such a force that Grover’s swing with the brass knuckles carried him away. The tall man rammed into the fence, and turned, but he was too late. Because Tim Colter had found more strength, and the heavy sack crashed against Grover’s chest. The man wheezed, and slid into a heap, spitting up blood.

  * * *

  “You need stitches,” Sergeant Meriden said. Colter dabbed the cuts on his face and head with a whiskey-soaked bandanna the major had given him. He cringed at the burning.

  “Doc Weston ain’t too bad,” Meriden said, “if he’s sober.”

  Pressing the bandanna against the back of his head, Colter used his other hand to splash water on his face from the horse trough.

  “Your doctor will be busy with your corporal and private, Sergeant,” Colter said. The LeMat had been wiped free of most of the dirt and returned to Colter’s holster. The mule had stopped kicking. Plenty Medicine looked ready to leave Fort Bridger, which certainly had been a lot friendlier when Jim Bridger had been running it.

  “Probably right,” Meriden said. “Turner’s arm’s so busted up, he won’t be salutin’ nobody for a spell. And with as many ribs as Grover busted up, he might not even be alive in a few days iffen one of those ribs sticks into his lungs.”

  “Better him than me.” Colter had not forgotten what Jed Reno had taught him.

  Most of the foot soldiers kept a lot of distance from Colter, as he hoisted the sack and secured it onto the packsaddle.

  “What, may I ask, do you have in that bag, sir?” the major asked.

  Turning around, Colter smiled. “Just some Oregon Boots, Major. Just some Oregon Boots.”

  CHAPTER 14

  He followed Groshon Creek out of Fort Bridger, and then kept along Blacks Fork as he made his way east. When eventually the creek merged with Smith’s Fork, he left the water and moved through the hard country, swimming the Green, which was heavy with snowmelt at this time of year, and then staying close to Bitter Creek as it meandered through the southern part of the Red Desert. Purple sage guided his way as he rode, the days disappearing, the cuts on his face and head scabbing over, no longer throbbing. Past the Continental Divide, Point of Rocks, Table Rock. South Pass lay to the north of him, and now the west
. This country was new to him, but he figured the directions Sergeant Meriden had given him would get him to the Union Pacific at some point. If he wasn’t killed.

  In a few days, he saw the smoke signals rising from distant hills.

  A man alone, traveling with a pack mule, would make an inviting target for any Cheyenne Indian, even if that tribe wasn’t on the warpath. Yet the Indians must have found him a curiosity, or maybe deemed him crazy. What honor was there in taking the scalp of a man driven insane? That would bring only shame to the Cheyennes, and a good black stallion and a mean-spirited mule was not worth that. Even if mule made a good supper for a village.

  It took him a week from Fort Bridger before he crossed the North Platte River. Five days later, he rode into Fort Sanders, an army post of wood that looked as though the wind might blow it away. And there certainly was wind. The soldiers there showed little interest in Plenty Medicine, the mule, or him, but a chatty sergeant informed him that he would find the railroad a short ride east.

  “They be expectin’ the rails here sometime in a week or so,” the soldier said. “Maybe even sooner.”

  That much seemed obvious. Canvas tents flapped in the gusts, and wagonloads of wood were parked along what folks were turning into streets. Already some sod huts had been dug out, and log cabins built. Colter looked and marveled. He was watching the birth of a town.

  “Gonna call it Laramie,” the sergeant said. “Laramie City.”

  “Another Hell on Wheels?” Colter asked.

  The sergeant shrugged. “For a spell, I reckon. But towns grow out of them sort of shenanigans. The law comes to a place, in good order. Or the town just dies and folks move along. Where you bound?”

  “Violet,” Colter answered.

  The sergeant almost choked on the bulge of tobacco in his cheek. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, turned, and spit.

  “That’s one town I’d like to see die.”

  Colter looked, but he knew to keep his mouth shut. The sergeant liked to gab, and would need no prodding.

  “It’s a hard day’s ride from here. Real hard. Day and a half, maybe two, probably take you with that mule. Too many of my boys, they get to hankerin’ for some female company, or to drink and gamble and lose all their pay. So they ride or walk or practically run the forty miles to Violence. That’s what we call it. What everybody calls it. Not Violet. Because Violence is what it is. You’ll meet the U.P. rails long before that. Then you just follow the iron till you come to it. Till you come to Hell.”

  “You can’t do anything about it?” Colter asked, although he knew the answer. “Clean it up?”

  “No. It ain’t the army’s matter. And there’s another post closer, Fort Russell. Near Cheyenne. I got to think they got a much bigger problem with Violence than I do, being it’s just ten or twelve or fifteen miles from there.”

  Colter held out his hand, and liked the sergeant’s firm grip.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “you’ve been most helpful, and quite kind. This is a much better reception than I got at Fort Bridger.”

  The noncommissioned officer spit.

  “What you plan on doing in Violence, mister, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m going to be the town marshal.”

  The sergeant stared, waited for the joke to be admitted, and when it did not come, he turned his head to spit again. When he looked back at Colter, he sized him up, glanced at the holstered LeMat, and said:

  “Wait till you see what kind of reception you get in Violence . . . Marshal.”

  * * *

  He knew he was nearing the Union Pacific. A faint line of smoke streamed into the pale sky past a few rolling, treeless hills. Not smoke signals from Indians. No, this smoke was black and thick, and fairly steady. A locomotive, Colter figured, likely with a load of supplies.

  Yet, when he crested the hill and came to the flats, he saw the first railroaders. Colter reined in, wet his lips, and swallowed down the bile that was rising in his throat. He kicked the black into a walk and pulled the mule behind him. There were no rails, no train, no telegraph poles, but six white men, two saddle horses, and a wagon. A surveying crew, Colter thought as he pushed back his coattails for easier access to the LeMat.

  There was another horse, too, but it seemed out of place. A pinto, more white than brown, with an Indian saddle and hackamore, tied to the right rear wheel of the wagon.

  One of the men, a bearded man in plaid britches stuck inside work boots, nudged another man and spoke to the others, who seemed preoccupied with their task. They had unhitched the wagon, led the team of mules a few yards away, and pushed up the wagon tongue. A rope hung down from the top of the wooden log. The end of the rope had been fashioned into a loop. That loop was being fitted over an Indian’s head.

  “Howdy.” Colter stopped the horse, and hooked a leg over the saddle horn as he pushed back the brim of his hat.

  The bearded man pointed a rifle, an old Enfield, in Colter’s general direction. Another drew an Army Colt from his waistband. As far as Colter could tell, the rest of the work crew carried no weapons other than surveying equipment and knives.

  “Where in hell did you come from?” the bearded man asked.

  “Oregon,” Colter answered with a smile. He looked, however, at the Indian.

  “The hell you say,” said a pockmarked worker as he mopped his sweaty face with a rag.

  “Salem, Oregon. Been riding a long way.” Colter gestured toward the black smoke. “Got a job in Violence.”

  “Gambler?” the bearded man asked.

  “Well . . .” Colter looked away from the Indian. “I reckon you could say it’s a gamble. Yes, sir. It’s most definitely a gamble.” He pointed at the Indian. “Trouble?”

  “Redskin,” the man in blue denim and a collarless shirt said. He was the one with the Army .44. “And redskins are always trouble.”

  “LeRoy caught him snoopin’,” said the shortest one. His right hand rested on a wooden tripod, which held an interesting device, that ten-inch-or-so telescope affixed to a circle. This instrument had a six-inch horizontal circle, and a five-inch vertical circle and needle. A surveyor’s transit, at least, that’s what Colter thought the gadget was called.

  “We figured to make him a good Injun,” the sweaty man said with a laugh.

  “Causing you trouble, eh?” No one answered. So Colter figured that meant that the Indian had not been doing anything. “Let me see what I can get out of him.” He dismounted easily, but even before his feet settled in the tall grass, the Enfield was pointed at his midsection.

  “This any of yer affairs, stranger?” the man said.

  “Yeah. And yours, too. You ask this Indian anything?”

  “He don’t speak no English,” the bearded man replied.

  “And he might have twenty or forty friends waiting over one of those rises.” Ignoring the Enfield, Colter moved toward the Indian. But even as the two surveyors closest to the Indian and the wagon tongue backed away a few feet, Colter could feel the rifled musket and the Army Colt being aimed at his back. He heard the metallic click of the .44’s hammer.

  “Vé-ho-é-nestsestotse?” Colter asked.

  The youngest one, a freckle-faced redhead, asked in an Irish brogue, “You speak that talk?”

  “That’s the limit of my Cheyenne,” Colter answered.

  The Indian shook his head. He looked to be somewhere between forty and fifty, his braids showing threads of silver, his face scarred, forehead knotted, eyes hard. He was Cheyenne. That much seemed obvious, and he looked straight through Colter, studying him, even tilting his head.

  Colter signed his name. Well, not really his name, although he said, in English, “I am Tim Colter.” The sign he gave was that of a star. It was the closest Colter could think of explaining that he was a lawman.

  “Tim . . .” The Indian’s voice was guttural, but easy to understand. “Col-ter.”

  “That’s right.”

  Then the Cheyenne said.
“Plen-ty . . . Med-cine.”

  Colter blinked in astonishment. This warrior knew Jed Reno, and he seemed to remember Tim Colter. Colter had not known many Indians in all of his life, and he couldn’t say he had known any when he had been traveling along the Oregon Trail or searching for his sister. But . . .

  “I thought that buck didn’t speak no English,” the bearded man said.

  “He doesn’t,” Colter said, waving his left hand to make the bearded man keep quiet. Colter concentrated on the Indian as he moved his leathery hands and fingers, as the Cheyenne rubbed four fingers in a circle, counterclockwise, along his right cheek, and, immediately afterward, held two hands in front of him, the palms up, and spread those hands apart. “Red Prairie.” Colter could not believe it.

  “He said that,” the Irish boy asked, “with nothing but hands and fingers.”

  “Red Prairie,” Colter said again.

  “What’s that mean?” the man with the Colt said. “That this prairie’s gonna run red with our blood. Why, that dirty red Injun. String him up, boys.”

  Colter spun, the LeMat in his right hand. The gunshot roared, and down went the man with the Colt, clutching his right thigh. Before the bearded man could blink, the LeMat spoke again, and this bullet winged off the Enfield, sending it spinning skyward while driving the bearded man onto his buttocks. Next, the heavy pistol, already cocked, pointed at the redhead and a tobacco-chewer, the two closest to the wagon tongue.

  “Fun’s over, boys,” Colter said.

  The one with the bullet in his thigh moaned. The bearded man shook his stinging hands.

  The sweaty man’s jaw dropped open, but he did not speak.

  Colter waved the smoking cannon in his right hand at the Irish boy.

  “Cut Red Prairie loose,” he said.

  “But . . .”

  The LeMat’s barrel lifted, and the boy pulled a pocketknife from his pants pocket.

  “Get your horse, Red Prairie,” Colter said, and watched the Indian, massaging his wrists to get the circulation going again, move toward the wagon and his pinto pony.

  “This wasn’t none of your affair, mister.” The bearded man, still on his butt, had found his voice.